'Net Features : brand advertising

Targeting Ads By Past Social Media Behavior

Michael Garrity — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:11:00 GMT

Often, as unfortunate as it is, brand marketers will miss out on potential customers (and revenue) because they don't have the ability at the time to capitalize on their interest in a product or service. Until recently, those customers were basically lost, but now advertising platform provider LocalResponse wants to bring them back.

The company, which specializes in helping marketers respond to real-time consumer intent, is launching a brand new product called HIT (historical intent targeting) that will let brands “go back in time” to deliver ads based on a consumer’s past social media behavior across a variety of public networks, including Instagram, Twitter and Foursquare.

LocalResponse’s ad targeting and display platform will mine public social media channels to seek out customers that have expressed interest or “intent” in the products, brand or lifestyle associated with their advertising partners, allowing these marketers to target consumers who have shown explicit intent (such as a Foursquare check-in) or implicit intent toward their brand.

HIT works by mining tons of historical data that looks at tweets, shares, posts, check-ins and more across a range of social media sites. So, for instance, if a consumer once tweeted positively about a film they saw during the summer, studios can use that information to send them ads about the movie’s upcoming DVD release many months later. In fact, one of LocalResponse’s early partners during its pilot program was Sony Pictures, and it’s reported “impressive results” from its campaigns so far.

In launching HIT, LocalResponse is able to ensure that marketers aren’t relying too much on more recent or even real-time data, allowing advertisers to leverage consumers that displayed interested in a brand or product on a social media site months, or even years, before. As a result, ads can become even more contextual and valuable for marketers.

Hot Reads for Web Marketers

Michael Garrity — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:30:00 GMT

Labor Day is right around the corner, which means that we're about to enter the busiest time of year for Internet marketers. Summer break will be over and people will begin to flock to the Web for a variety of reasons, making this the perfect time for marketers to brush up on their mad marketing skills.

The best way to do that is to spend the upcoming long weekend curled up with a nice book, preferably outside by the grill. That is why our crack investigative team has scoured the Web to find some of the most recent books on Internet marketing. These books cover a variety of techniques, from social media to SEO to analytics and much, much more.

Regardless of your experience as an online marketer, there is always new innovation and information to be gleaned, and these books will help you improve upon what you already know. Please keep in mind that there are only two weeks left to secure a free copy of WM's own book, Web 360: The Fundamentals of Web Success, which can be obtained by ordering a professional-level subscription to Website Magazine.

Until then, here are some of the hottest reads about Internet marketing:

Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen
This book is by Dave Kerpen, who is the founder and CEO of the award-winning social media marketing firm Likeable Media. So, needless to say, he has some experience in the field. This book covers an array of topics concerning social media marketing, such as the importance of responding to comments, defining your target audience and creating a presence for your company on the social network. This is one of the most highly rated books on the subject on all of Amazon, and it was just released earlier this year. This is a great start, then, for anyone looking to quickly improve their brand's social media profile(s).

The Internet Marketing Bible by Zeke Camusio
This was a book specifically written for business owners and marketers, meaning it doesn't contain much (if any) technical jargon that could confuse unfamiliar readers. Camusio designed the book to be to-the-point, removing all of the unnecessary elements that will often clutter other books on Internet marketing and getting right into the action, providing a step-by-step tutorial on how to become successful online. It covers a range of topics, everything from SEO to Pay-Per-Click to website design, and provides the necessary tools and strategies that will help you get a better grasp on the basics of the Internet marketing world. This is a great book for marketers who are just starting out, but also an excellent resource for seasoned marketers as well.

SEO Made Simple (Second Edition): Strategies for Dominating the World's Largest Search Engine by Michael H. Fleischner
The second edition of the highly praised and very popular SEO Made Simple is an excellent revision of an already great book. The focus of this book, as the subtitle tells us, is not just how to improve your SEO, but how to conquer Google. Fleischner has been working in online marketing for over fourteen years and is considered an expert in the fields of SEO and Internet marketing. Included in this title are tips and tricks for social media SEO, using Google Places, meta tags and even a step-by-step link building guide. This new edition adds over 20 new pages of various techniques to optimize your brand or website's search results. This may be the most comprehensive book on the subject of SEO, and with the additions included in the second edition, the best keeps getting better.

Content is Cash: Leveraging Great Content and the Web for Increased Traffic, Sales, Leads and Buzz by Wendy Montes de Oca
Content may be the most overlooked aspect of Internet marketing, and this book aims to fix that. This books shows you how you can integrate and syncronize some of the best Web marketing techniques available today to, as the title states, drive traffic, sales, leads and buzz for your brand based on your preexisting content. Among the subjects covered in the book are how to use undiscovered content that is both helpful and actionable, make your content easier to find and use content to create more visibility and awareness for your brand or site. Montes de Oca has over twenty years of professional experience and is currently a marketing blogger and writer, as well as owner of the Precision Marketing and Media consulting firm.

Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day by Evgenii Prussakov
This is the affiliate marketing release by the hugely popular An Hour a Day series of Internet marketing books. This guide is meant to provide a detailed, real-world, task-based approach to developing and managing an affiliate marketing program. It covers various aspects of the affiliate business, such as market research, payment models, recruiting and more. This book is full of helpful hints, tips and techniques that can help any aspiring affiliate really get off the ground and should be considered essential reading for anyone looking to launch their own network. Plus, it's co-authored by Evgenii Prussakov, aka Geno, the founder of AM Navigator and one of the most successful and famous affiliate marketers in the world. If you're going to trust anybody, he's not a bad choice.

Brand Media Strategy: Integrated Communications Planning in the Digital Era by Antony Young
Unlike Likeable Social Media, this book, by Optimedia International U.S. CEO Antony Young, is about promoting your brand all over the Web, instead of just on social media sites. Of course, social media is heavily featured in Brand Media Strategy, but so are YouTube, the iPhone and other areas of the Web where your brand needs to make itself known. Young covers the future of advertising in traditional media and how it will interact and compete with digital media, as well as how to get maximum impact out of digital media portals like search, social and mobile. This book offers a look at the Internet from a media-based perspective and will help you stretch the Web to raise awareness for your brand as far as you can.

StumbleUpon Launches New Social Media Brand Advertising

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:15:00 GMT

Content discovery engine StumbleUpon announced today the availability of a social media brand advertising platform dubbed Paid Discovery - and you are either going to love it, or hate it.

"Today's display ads fundamentally miss what is critical for brands: integrating relevant sponsored content with the intended user experience," said Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon CEO and co-founder. "With Paid Discovery, marketers and agencies can connect directly with customers interested in discovering their products and gain valuable insights into how their customers are engaging with them."

Paid Discovery recommends sponsored content to users who have expressed preference for a particular interest. What StumbeUpon has effectively done is start charging advertisers for that preference and ad priority creating a social-driven promotional paltform.

Brands of course don’t “connect directly with customers” for free. If you're a brand advertiser looking to increase awareness (and site visits) then the modest cost (discussed below) is going to be attractive. The end result however for millions of publishers distributing their content through StumbleUpon (or letting consumers spread content naturally) is that their own messages might simply be drowned out among the advertising noise.

StumbleUpon has had a pay-per-visitor program for about as long as I can remember, but what makes the Paid Discovery offering just announced so appealing for brand advertisers, is that in addition to being able to target users by standard criteria (interest, location and demographics) which costs $0.05/per visit without much control, sponsored content from these brands can now receive priority serving ($0.10/per visit) or guaranteed top serving priority ($0.25/per visit) in content streams. And as you might imagine, you have to pay more for the privilege.